The Jefferson County War: Visiting Romney HQ in Colorado's Most Contested District

At the Barnes & Noble in suburban Lakewood, Colorado, where I've come to use the wi-fi, nothing in particular is happening. Pleasant-looking middle-aged people dot the tables at the café, one table peering at a laptop, another discussing public schooling. It smells like books. A guy in running pants studies review materials for a medical technician's exam. You'd never know you were sitting smack in the middle of one of the most fiercely contested pieces of turf, in the middle of one of the most fiercely contested states, in the middle of one of the most fiercely contested elections in history. You kind of want to knock over a table and make everyone fistfight.

But the campaign here in Jefferson County—or JeffCo, as the politicos here all seem to call it—appears to be unfolding in typically suburban style. At the Romney campaign's state headquarters, just down the road and into the office park, rows of fluffly-haired volunteers were busy making phone calls this morning. (Sample conversation, verbatim, from about 40 minutes ago: "Hello, this is Marcia, calling on behalf of the Romney campaign. Oh, is your name Marcia, too?") Gaily colored handmade signs are plastered across the walls of the phone bank: "Commit to Mitt" and "Colorado [Hearts] Ann." All the volunteers seemed to be in their sixties or seventies (it's the middle of the day, after all), and they were all of them white, and notably friendly-sounding. Between calls they ambled over to the snack table, where arrays of cookies and dessert bars sat on plates. A young staffer with a goatee set a new batch of coffee brewing. It sounded to me like the volunteers were getting good responses on the phones, and they should be: with 24 hours to go, it's time to be calling through your supporters and making sure they have the information they need to get out and vote.

"As JeffCo goes, so goes Colorado," Romney's state spokesman Chris Walker told me, quoting the political adage here. Jefferson County sits on the eastern slope of the Front Range and makes up a good portion of Denver's western suburbs. Its 540,000 souls, at last official count, are 80 percent white and 15 percent Latino. Ninety-three percent have a high school diploma and 39 percent have a bachelors degree or higher; median household income is $66,000. The average drive to work is 26 minutes. In short, this is lovely, decent, nice-looking, average America: "work during the week and Broncos games on Sunday," as one staffer put it. The voters here are exactly the kind of people who have been giving both campaigns nightmares.

Walker, sandy-haired and crisply dressed, said the Romney campaign is confident about their operation here, and statewide. "This is a state that Barack Obama won by nine points in 2008, and we're tied or ahead in most polls," he pointed out. "Our ground game and our volunteer efforts have exceeded any Republican ground game to date."

Spokesmen are always going to tell you that their operation is amazing and unprecedented. But we don't have much choice other than to go by the numbers they provide, for lack of a way to check them. By their official count, Walker said, Republicans have knocked on four times as many doors as they did in 2008, and have made twice as many calls. Last week they made 400,000 voter contacts—calls and knocks—statewide. When I asked Walker about Obama's rally last night, he didn't seem too impressed, putting the crowd count, unsurprisingly, at about half of the 20,000 that his opponents publicized. Bringing in Dave Matthews, he said, "is more of a base-driving effort than a real political rally," he said. Whereas, he said, driving the enthusiasm for Romney, and pushing switchers into their camp, is a deep frustration with the economy.

The Obama campaign, as we know, is pretty open about their view that base voters are going to decide this election. But here in JeffCo where there are fewer obvious pools of Obama supporters than neighboring Denver, it would seem that they'll have to be particularly creative—or perhaps just more dogged—in finding and turning out their people. The Obama campaign has a get-out-the-vote rally scheduled at their Lakewood office in half an hour, and I'm headed over there now to compare.